Well, this book purports to be the answer … for what ails the Caribbean.
The book asserts that the Caribbean is in crisis; that the region of 42 million people in the 30 member-states is dysfunctional … to the point of flirting with Failed-State status. It is that serious!
These alarming abandonment rates have been communicated to the governments and leaders of the region and yet still, the problem persists. They have not taken action to curb the problem.
Comes now the book Go Lean…Caribbean. This serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). This 370-page publication presents the solutions for all the region, all the 4 language groups (Dutch, English, French and Spanish) by describing 144 different missions to elevate the economic, security and governing engines of the region. This is a serious answer to a serious crisis.
This book is published by a community development foundation made up of mostly Caribbean Diaspora. These ones have grown tired of waiting.
“Now I tired waiting”?
I’ve come to fix the …
This familiar refrain in the Caribbean has been repeated time and again, even sang in melody and rhyme. See/listen here, the classic Calypso song from the legendary Mighty Sparrow (and the lyrics in the Appendix below):
Published on Oct 22, 2012 – This song describes a frustrated man who was promised to marry a “not so beautiful” woman, but who was more prosperous economically than himself. This is presented here as a metaphor, of the frustration of waiting for change and finally taking positive action to effect the change oneself.
Album : Party Classics. 1986
All ownership belong to the copyright holder. There is no assumption of infringement here.
The Caribbean Diaspora – living abroad in the US, Canada and Western Europe – were always taught to believe that the Caribbean is the greatest address on the planet, and yet it was essential that they leave to forge an existence elsewhere. They have endured in these foreign lands, but they are still only alien residents. It is not home!
If only there were some solutions for their homeland?
Solutions for the Caribbean are the prime directives of the Go Lean/CU roadmap; just consider these:
Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.
The quest of the Go Lean/CU roadmap is direct: to make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play. The book presents how this quest is conceivable, believable and achievable. It posits that the foundation is now in place, and we only need some technocratic deliveries to move the Caribbean member-states from the current status quo to the new destination: a better homeland. This presents a solution where our youth will no longer have to leave, and our older generations can relish a return back home.
“Now I tired waiting”, I come to fix … “the situation”. We now present you the “fix”!
She ugly yes, but she wearing them expensive dress
The People say she ugly, but she father full a money
Oh Lord Mamma, woy woy
Good morning Mister Walker
I come to see your daughter
Oh, Mister Walker!
I come to see your daughter
Sweet Rosemarie, she promise she gone marry me And now I tired waiting!
I come to fix the wedding
After the wedding day, I don’t care what nobody say
Everytime I take a good look at she face I see a bankbook
Oh Lord Mamma, woy woy
Good morning Mister Walker
I come to see your daughter
Hmm, Mister Walker!
I come to see your daughter
Sweet Rosemarie, she promise she gone marry me And now I tired waiting!
I come to fix the wedding, woy
Apart from that, they say how she so big and fat
When she dress they tantalize she, saying monkey wearing mini
Oh Lord Mamma, woy woy
Good morning Mister Walker
I come to see your daughter
Oy, Mister Walker!
I come to see your daughter
Sweet Rosemarie, she promise she gone marry me And now I tired waiting!
I come to fix the wedding, Hmm
All I know, is I don’t intend to let she go
Cause if she was a beauty, nothing like me could get she
Oh Lord Mamma, woy woy
Good morning Mister Walker
I come to see your daughter
Oy, Mister Walker!
I come to see your daughter
Sweet Rosemarie, she promise she gone marry me And now I tired waiting!
I come to fix the wedding, oh
The United Nations – bless their heart – they mean well, but they are a complete failure.
You see, there is intent …
… and then there is delivery. The UN is a failure in delivery. In addition to failures of the UN to provide peace and security in the world – the prime directive of their charter – there is also direct, immediate repercussions of the presence of their Peacekeepers. These are human beings who bring human frailties with them – think love and romance.
So a word to the wise in the Caribbean: “Do not count on the UN nor their Peacekeeping Forces to provide positive solutions for the Caribbean region”.
Who are the Peacekeepers and what do they do? See VIDEO here:
So rather than depend on the UN or any foreign Peacekeepers, we need our own local and/or regional solution.
The book Go Lean…Caribbean posits that the region needs to prepare its own security apparatus for its own security needs. We need to not depend on UN peacekeeping nor foreign peacekeeping. The request is that all Caribbean member-states confederate and empower a security force to execute a limited scope on our sovereign territories.
This will help us to avoid some peripheral problems like this one here in the following news report:
By: David McFadden
PORT SALUT, Haiti (AP) — The first time Rosa Mina Joseph met Julio Cesar Posse he was hanging out in civilian clothes on the beach in her hometown in southern Haiti, where he was stationed as a member of a U.N. peacekeeping force.
Within weeks, she says, the Uruguayan marine was showing up every weekend at her family’s shack, pledging his love in Spanish and broken Haitian Creole.
But about a year later when his rotation ended, Posse quietly returned home. He left behind Joseph, a broken-hearted 17-year-old with an infant and no way to support the child without depending on struggling relatives.
“He promised me he’d marry me and would take care of me,” Joseph, now 22, tearfully said in a recent interview at her mother’s house in Port Salut, a town along the southwestern tip of Haiti.
After years of mounting frustration, she and several other women with children fathered by peacekeepers say they will now pursue claims for child support against the absentee fathers and the U.N.
Haitian human rights attorney Mario Joseph said he will file civil suits in Haiti this month. Joseph’s law firm also is involved in a high-profile claim on behalf of 5,000 cholera victims who blame the U.N. for introducing the disease. A U.S. federal appeals panel in New York is weighing whether the lawsuit can proceed or if the United Nations is entitled to immunity.
The peacekeeping force was sent to Haiti in 2004 to keep order following a violent rebellion that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Since then, some peacekeepers have been accused of rape and other abuse, of using excessive force and of inadvertently introducing cholera because of inadequate sanitation at a base used by troops from Nepal.
U.N. troops have been accused of sexual exploitation elsewhere as well, most recently in the Central African Republic, and “peacekeeper babies,” have long been a legacy of their deployments, as they have for other military forces throughout history.
Rosa Mina Joseph, whose son was born in 2011, said she received an envelope with $300 in cash from the U.N. two years ago when it established paternity. She had to drop out of school to care for the son and her dreams of becoming a nurse have all but vanished.
Posse sent her $100 once from Uruguay, she said, but has not sent anything more.
While Joseph was a minor at the time she gave birth, potential criminal charges against the marine would confront a difficult legal challenge: U.N. peacekeepers can’t be prosecuted in the countries in which they serve under international agreements.
The Associated Press does not typically identify sexual assault victims, but Joseph gave permission as long as a photo of her face was not published.
“I want him to take responsibility to care for his son because I don’t have the means by myself,” she said in the yard where she spends her days doing laundry and cooking.
The U.N. force in Haiti currently includes 4,899 uniformed personnel, a combination of military and civilian police, from more than a dozen countries. That’s down from over 13,000 peacekeepers following Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake.
Ghandi Shukry, head of a Conduct and Discipline Unit in the U.N. mission, which is known by its French acronym MINUSTAH, said 29 claims for paternity have been submitted to the U.N. in Haiti. He said 18 of the claimants have been classified as “victims” by the world body because they were receiving some kind of support.
“We are not facing a current wave of paternity claims. They are all kind of old cases,” said Shukry, stressing that any kind of sexual relations by peacekeepers and locals is prohibited.
The U.N. official confirmed that Joseph and three other Port Salut women represented by the attorney did have paternity established in 2014 after DNA swabs from the mothers, children and peacekeepers were analyzed. He declined to discuss any of the cases in detail.
He said that two members of his unit maintain regular contact with the Port Salut women. MINUSTAH also put the women in touch with a Uruguayan military representative, he said, since the U.N. allows troop-contributing countries to investigate allegations and decide how to pursue paternity claims.
The Port Salut women, however, say contact with U.N. staffers or Uruguay’s military representative is rare and generally bewildering.
A 2015 U.N. report by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that there were “numerous obstacles to having paternity recognized and to obtaining support for children of United Nations personnel, whether they were born as a result of sexual exploitation and abuse or not.”
MINUSTAH’s uniformed personnel are now barred from leaving bases alone or when wearing civilian clothing and mission rules have changed in recent years to prohibit any fraternization. “Not only sexual relations are prohibited; even having normal relations with the local population is prohibited,” Shukry said.
Uruguay’s Navy spokesman, Capt. Gaston Jaunsolo, acknowledged there have been a small number of paternity cases and said service members found guilty are sanctioned and barred from peacekeeping missions.
He confirmed that Posse continued in the Navy and said service members are forbidden to speak the press without permission. A listed phone number for Posse was out of service. His profile on a social networking site says he’s looking for a young woman between 18 and 25 to start a family with.
The Uruguayan Army issued a statement to AP saying it’s sent roughly 3,000 troops to Haiti since 2011 and four paternity allegations were made against that military branch. There’s been one positive DNA test, the statement said, and no complaints have been made since 2014. It said the soldier who tested positive was punished but not discharged.
Meanwhile, the women struggling to raise their kids in Port Salut are eking out a living with the help of their families. Their children are sometimes teased by other kids who call them “MINUSTAH babies” or mockingly ask where their daddies are.
“When he’s older I’ll find a way to explain things. For now, the only thing I can say is that his father’s not here,” Joseph said as she held a snapshot showing her and Posse together at her 17th birthday party, a heart drawn on the back of it reading “Osemina y Julio.”
___
AP writer Leonardo Haberkorn contributed from Montevideo, Uruguay.
There is a need for a local Caribbean security solution. The book Go Lean … Caribbean promotes the plan to confederate under a unified entity made up of the Caribbean to provide homeland security to the Caribbean. But homeland security for the Caribbean has a different meaning than some other regions and countries. Though we must be on defense against military intrusions like terrorism & piracy, we mostly have to contend with threats that may imperil the region’s economic engines, and crime remediation and mitigation. The CU security goal is for public safety! This goal is detailed in the book as it serves as a roadmap for the introduction of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The CU is set to optimize Caribbean society through economic empowerment and also security implementations. The book describes that these two dynamics are inextricably linked in the same societal elevation endeavor. In fact, the Go Lean roadmap presents the following 3 prime directives:
Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.
The Go Lean book contends that bad actors will emerge just as a result of economic successes in the region. This point is pronounced early in the book with the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 12) that claims:
x. Whereas we are surrounded and allied to nations of larger proportions in land mass, populations, and treasuries, elements in their societies may have ill-intent in their pursuits, at the expense of the safety and security of our citizens. We must therefore appoint “new guards” to ensure our public safety and threats against our society, both domestic and foreign. The Federation must employ the latest advances and best practices … to assuage continuous threats against public safety.
xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes, including piracy and other forms of terrorism, can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.
The Caribbean appointing “new guards”, or a security pact to ensure public safety is not so new an endeavor on the world scene; security threats have been a constant in the modern world. Since World War II, the UN, by means of its Security Council have tried to be the “new guard” for mitigating threats around the world. And yet, skirmishes, revolts and uprisings are a constant on the world scene. Yes, the UN has failed on the delivery execution of this charter.
There continues to be the need for intervention around the world. The decisioning of UN Peacekeeping Forces comes from this Security Council. The Council, following a mandate for the maintenance of international peace and security, assigns the Peacekeepers for a wide-variety of engagements. Consider the details of these current engagements in Appendix B below.
During the entire existence of the UN, there has not been a need for Peacekeepers in North America (US, Canada or Mexico) among these NAFTA members. There also has not been a need for Peacekeepers in the 27 member-states that now constitute the European Union – once they joined the EU. The truth is that integrated communities can more effectively provide their own security solutions, as an extension of the economic cooperation. This, an integrated community, is the quest of the CU/Go Lean roadmap, and to model the EU structure in our economic and security implementations.
So the Caribbean appointing “new guards”, or a security pact to ensure justice institutions and public safety in this region is not so revolutionary as a concept on the world scene. It is just what the mature democracies do. The Go Lean roadmap calls for a permanent professional security apparatus with naval and ground (Marine) forces, plus its own Military Justice establishment. This security pact would be sanctioned by all 30 CU member-states. The CU Trade Federation will lead, fund and facilitate this security force, encapsulating all the (full-time or part-time) existing armed forces in the region. This CU Homeland Security Force would get its legal authorization from a legal Status of Forces Agreement signed with the CU treaty enhancements.
This implementation will result in lesser social repercussions, because it will be Caribbean people protecting the Caribbean. So the ramifications as depicted in the foregoing news article, and in the Appendix A below, will be lessened.
The truth is: Power abuses; and absolute power abuses absolutely. So this is not just a Pan-African problem, this is a human rights problem, for even those entities bringing relief, as was the intention in Haiti, can cause distress. Accountability and transparency must therefore be present and evident in all justice initiatives. This is the Go Lean plan for the military establishment; as detailed in the book (Page 177):
Military Justice – The CU will carefully monitor the activities of all military units (Marines, Navy & Coast Guard) – this accountability will be the by-product of increased CU funding. The CU will assume Judge Advocate General (JAG) role for military justice affairs.
This CU Security Apparatus is “Step One, Day One” in the Go Lean roadmap, covering the approach for adequate accountability and control. The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to provide increased public safety & security in the Caribbean region:
Economic Principle – Consequences of Choices Lie in Future
Page 21
Community Ethos – Privacy –vs- Public Protection
Page 23
Community Ethos – Anti-Bullying and Mitigation
Page 23
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens
Page 23
Community Ethos – Minority Equalization
Page 24
Community Ethos – Cooperatives
Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good
Page 37
Tactical – Confederating a non-sovereign union
Page 63
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy
Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Homeland Security
Page 75
Implementation – Start-up Security Initiatives
Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Foster International Aid
Page 115
Implementation – Reasons to Repatriate
Page 118
Planning – Ways to Model the EU
Page 130
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better
Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices
Page 134
Planning – Lessons Learned from the West Indies Federation
Page 135
Planning – Lessons from East Germany
Page 139
Planning – Lessons from the American West
Page 142
Planning – Lessons from Egypt
Page 143
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy
Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance
Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract
Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Leadership
Page 171
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice – Military Prosecutions
Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Reduce Crime
Page 178
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security
Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Mitigate Terrorism
Page 181
Advocacy – Ways to Improve for Natural Disasters
Page 184
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Extractions
Page 196
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Fisheries
Page 210
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights
Page 220
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti
Page 238
Other subjects related to security and justice empowerments for the region have been blogged in previous Go Lean…Caribbean commentaries, as sampled here:
The narrative in the foregoing news article is a “tale as old as time”:
Boy meets girl…
Boy protects girl.
Girl likes boy.
Boy seduces girl and leaves her with a baby … with no regard for future support.
This narrative, though sad, is not uniquely Caribbean nor United Nations. It is just a human (rights) story.
Better command of human rights and security in the Caribbean will lead to mitigation of these sad scenarios.
Charity … (and security) begins at home.
We know that “bad actors” will always emerge; we do not want a few “bad actors” – as in the violent rebellion that toppled Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004 – disrupting the peace of our 42 million Caribbean residents, or the 80 million visitors.
We know too that “wolves, sometimes dressed in “sheep’s clothing”, will always come to prey on the sheep”. This means you: UN Peacekeeper Julio Cesar Posse, who deflowered the innocent 17 year-old girl; and this means you of the UN Peacekeepers who were agitators – though not intentional – of the cholera disease resulting in 5,000 victims in Haiti.
The quest of the CU/Go Lean roadmap is better security and better justice executions for the people of the Caribbean region. Underlying to the prime directive of elevating the Caribbean societal engines – economics, security and governing – is the desire to simply make the Caribbean homeland, a better place to live, work and play.
Appendix A – Peacekeeping, human trafficking, and forced prostitution
Reporters witnessed a rapid increase in prostitution in Cambodia and Mozambique after UN peacekeeping forces moved in. In the 1996 U.N. study “The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children”, former first lady of Mozambique Graça Machel documented: “In 6 out of 12 country studies on sexual exploitation of children in situations of armed conflict prepared for the present report, the arrival of peacekeeping troops has been associated with a rapid rise in child prostitution.”[17]
Gita Sahgal spoke out in 2004 with regard to the fact that prostitution and sex abuse crops up wherever humanitarian intervention efforts are set up. She observed: “The issue with the UN is that peacekeeping operations unfortunately seem to be doing the same thing that other militaries do. Even the guardians have to be guarded.”[18]
… after 19 years in the NBA, contributing solidly to his team and league, while maintaining a low-key presence, Tim Duncan rides into the sunset on a career that has taken his team to the playoffs every year, won 2 League MVPs, 5 NBA championships, 3 NBA Finals MVP, 15 All Stars appearances and the 1997-98 Rookie of the Year Award.
Is he one of the greatest players of all time? … the greatest “Power Forward” perhaps?
In typical fashion, he downplays any talk of his greatness. This is consistent with his humble demeanor ever since he was the No. 1 overall pick out of Wake Forest in 1997. He said he never pays attention to comparisons between himself and other all-time greats:
“I don’t really care where the rankings go,” he said. ”I’m in the conversation. I’m OK with that. That’s above and beyond anything I ever thought I’d ever be. That in itself is an honor.”
Congratulations Tim Duncan. You deserve your champion’s accolades.
This commentary has previously sided with Mr. Duncan’s opponent in the recent NBA Finals. Here below are the previous blogs citing a hope for the Miami Heat’s dominance in the NBA Playoff tournament.
eMerge conference aims to jump-start Miami tech hub
But talent recognizes talent!
It is also good news, according to this foregoing news article, that Mr. Duncan will be returning for at least one more season.
By: The Caribbean Journal Staff
Tim Duncan isn’t going anywhere.
The St Croix native, who recently won his fifth NBA championship, will be returning to the San Antonio Spurs for his 18th NBA season.
The team announced Monday that the 38-year-old Duncan had exercised his player option for the 2014-2015 season, putting to rest any notion that he would be retiring.
Duncan helped the Spurs to a dominant 4-1 series win over the Miami Heat in this month’s NBA Finals.
The Christiansted native is one of five players in the history of the NBA to win five championships and five MVPs (either NBA Finals or regular season), along with Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Duncan leads all active players in career wins, with 898. Caribbean Journal Online News Source (Posted 06-23-2014; retrieved 06-26-2014) – http://www.caribjournal.com/2014/06/23/st-croixs-tim-duncan-to-return-to-spurs-for-another-season/
There is something bigger than sports alone at play here. As the foregoing news article depicts, Mr. Duncan is a member of the Caribbean Diaspora. He is recognized as one of the best in his field of endeavor; perhaps one of the best of all time. This is a claim of the book Go Lean … Caribbean, that sports require a genius qualifier and that genius ability can be found in abundance in the Caribbean. Mr. Duncan makes us all proud: Christiansted, St. Croix, the US Virgin Islands and all of the Caribbean.
The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), a technocratic federal government to administer and optimize the economic/security/ governing engines of the region’s 30 member-states. At the outset, the roadmap recognizes the value of sports with these statements in the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 13 & 14):
xxvi. Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including sciences, languages, arts, music and sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.
xxxi. Whereas sports have been a source of great pride for the Caribbean region, the economic returns from these ventures have not been evenly distributed as in other societies. The Federation must therefore facilitate the eco-systems and vertical industries of sports as a business, recreation, national pastime and even sports tourism – modeling the Olympics.
The Go Lean roadmap calls for the market organizations to better explore the economic opportunities for sports. Sports can be big business! But even when money is not involved, other benefits abound. As such the CU will enhance the engines to elevate sports at all levels: amateur, intercollegiate and professional.
The other issue related to Tim Duncan is that of “image”. Mr. Duncan could be a proud ambassador of Caribbean character. Personally, he does not advocate any political or economic agenda, so others must do that for him. As a public figure, his story is free to relate to the listening world of how impactful a Caribbean heritage can be.
The subjects of sports and Caribbean image have been related in many previous Go Lean blogs; highlighted here in the following samples:
The book Go Lean…Caribbean has an economic empowerment agenda, but there are still huge benefits for the region related to sports. The strategy is to consolidate the region’s 30 member-states / 4 languages into a Single Market of 42 million people – leverage for a viable sports landscape. The CU facilitation of applicable venues (stadia, arenas, fields, temporary structures) on CU-owned fairgrounds plus the negotiations for broadcast/streaming rights/licenses will elevate the art, science and genius of sports as an enterprise in the region.
Now is the time for all of the Caribbean to lean-in to the following community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies detailed in the book Go Lean … Caribbean to re-boot the delivery of the regional solutions to elevate the Caribbean region through sports:
Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways
Page 21
Community Ethos – Return on Investments
Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius
Page 27
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Negotiations
Page 32
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness
Page 36
Strategic – Vision – Integrating Region in to a Single Market
Page 45
Strategic – Staffing – Sporting Events at Fairgrounds
Page 55
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy
Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Sports & Culture Administration
Page 81
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Fairgrounds Administration
Page 83
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities (Fairgrounds)
Page 105
Implementation – Ways to Deliver
Page 109
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better
Page 131
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy
Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Local Government – Parks & Recreation
Page 169
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Events
Page 191
Advocacy – Ways to Promote Fairgrounds
Page 192
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology Expositions
Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Sports
Page 229
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Urban Living – Sports Leagues
Page 234
The foregoing article celebrates a Caribbean Champion. But there is more to celebrate with Caribbean life, culture and the homeland. With the Go Lean executions, we can all be champions, by making the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play.
The news in the below article is common … the other way around.
The United States government frequently post Travel Advisories for tourists to foreign countries, even the Caribbean in general and the Bahamas – the country of focus – in particular. But this time, the tables are turned. See the Travel Alert preceded by a related news article here:
Title: The Bahamas Just Issued A Travel Advisory For The U.S., Citing Police Violence By:Salvador Hernandez, BuzzFeed News Reporter
Sub-title: “Young males are asked to exercise extreme caution in affected cities in their interactions with the police. Do not be confrontational.”
The Bahamas on Friday issued a travel advisory [as follows] for citizens planning to go to the United States, warning them about the tensions in some cities over the shooting of young black men.
“Do not get involved in political or other demonstrations under any circumstances and avoid crowds,” the government warned.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration specifically warned young males to be aware of how they interact with U.S. police officers, telling them to “exercise extreme caution.”
“In particular, young males are asked to exercise extreme caution in affected cities in their interactions with the police,” the advisory states. “Do not be confrontational and cooperate.”
The advisory comes after five officers in Dallas were shot and killed Thursday by a sniper targeting police. Seven other officers were injured in the attack.
About 800 protesters were marching in the Dallas after police killings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota. On Friday, protests against police violence against black men also occurred in Atlanta, New York, and Phoenix.
The warning from the Ministry of of Foreign Affairs was also posted on the government’s Ministry of Environment and Housing Facebook page, and Consulate General’s New York website, and its own Facebook page.
The U.S. issues similar advisories when violence has broken out in other countries. For example, the State Department issued travel advisories for France after the terror attacks in Paris, in Bangladesh after 20 hostages were killed, and Mexico during a wave of drug cartel violence.
While some countries have warned its citizens about crime in foreign cities, a warning about possible unrest in the U.S. is uncommon.
An official with the U.S. Department of State declined to comment on the warning issued by the Bahamas.
———–
Alert!
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration Issues Travel Advisory for Bahamians traveling to United States of America
For Immediate Release
8 July 2016
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration has taken a note of the recent tensions in some American cities over shootings of young black males by police officers.
At the commencement of the Independence holiday weekend, many Bahamians will no doubt use the opportunity to travel, in particular to destinations in the United States.
We wish to advise all Bahamians traveling to the US but especially to the affected cities to exercise appropriate caution generally. In particular young males are asked to exercise extreme caution in affected cities in their interactions with the police. Do not be confrontational and cooperate.
If there is any issue please allow consular offices for The Bahamas to deal with the issues. Do not get involved in political or other demonstrations under any circumstances and avoid crowds.
The Bahamas has consular offices in New York, Washington, Miami and Atlanta and honorary consuls in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago and Houston.
Their addresses are on the Ministry’s website – mofa.gov.bs
Pay attention to the public notices and news announcements in the city that you are visiting.
Be safe, enjoy the holiday weekend and be sensible.
Source: Posted July 8, 2016 from: http://mofa.gov.bs/ministry-of-foreign-affairs-and-immigration-issues-travel-advisory-for-bahamians-traveling-to-united-states-of-america/
Cleveland police officer Nakia Jones posted a video on Facebook strongly criticizing “racist” police officers. Source: CNN
This is not a “cry wolf” scenario; there have been some real tragic episodes impacting the American social order… especially this week. Consider this recap:
A Facebook video vent viral showing white police officers killing a black man, Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Tuesday.
A Facebook video vent viral showing a white police officer killing a black man, Philando Castile, in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Wednesday.
On Thursday, a sniper – Micah Johnson, a Black man – opened fire on white police officers protecting a protest rally in Dallas, Texas by the Black Lives Matter movement, killing 5 officers and injuring 7 others, claiming to be enraged by the Cop-on-Black killings above.
Yes, there is the need for this unprecedented* advisory.
According to the book Go Lean…Caribbean, advisories of this sort need to be permanent, not just temporary. This is due to the many societal distresses incurred by Bahamians and Caribbean citizens traveling to the US for permanent residency; these ones should be warned. This book posits that it is easier for the Black-and-Brown populations of the Caribbean to prosper where planted in the Caribbean rather than fleeing to the US for refuge.
Neither societies are perfect! But the Go Lean book asserts that the societal engines in the Caribbean are easier to optimize than the societal defects in the American homeland.
The Go Lean book and movement serves as a roadmap for the introduction of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). With the word ‘Trade‘ in the CU‘s branding, obviously the CU is set to optimize Caribbean society through economic empowerment; but the truth of the matter is that the security dynamics of the region are inextricably linked to this economic endeavor. Therefore the Go Lean roadmap has 3 prime directives:
Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.
The Go Lean roadmap posits that the Caribbean region must work to optimize its society. So the request is that all Caribbean member-states form and empower a federal government to execute a limited scope on Caribbean nations and territories. The goal is to confederate under a unified entity for both economic and security causes. The Caribbean’s public safety must be holistic!
The Go Lean roadmap puts the focus on the Greater Good. This is defined as “the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.” – Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).
The US has bad actors.
The Caribbean has bad actors.
The Bahamas has bad actors.
The book contends that bad actors emerges just as a result of economic success. This point is pronounced early in the book with the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 12) that claims:
x. Whereas we are surrounded and allied to nations of larger proportions in land mass, populations, and treasuries, elements in their societies may have ill-intent in their pursuits, at the expense of the safety and security of our citizens. We must therefore appoint “new guards” to ensure our public safety and threats against our society, both domestic and foreign. The Federation must employ the latest advances and best practices … to assuage continuous threats against public safety.
xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes, including piracy and other forms of terrorism, can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.
The Caribbean appointing “new guards”, or a security pact to ensure public safety is a comprehensive endeavor, encapsulating the needs of all Caribbean stakeholders: governments, institutions and residents.
As the Bahamas Ministry of Foreign Affairs give a travel advisory to Black Bahamians (90% of population) traveling to the US to avoid danger in interacting with the US police establishment, the planners for an elevated Caribbean society, the Go Lean movement, give warning that the presence and practices of our American neighbors are not always benevolent for us in the Caribbean.
This is a mission of the Go Lean roadmap, to dissuade the high emigration rates of Caribbean citizens to the American homeland.
Why do they flee?
“Push” and “pull” reasons.
Where as “push” refers to the societal defects in the Caribbean that moves people to want to get away, “pull” factors, on the other hand, refer to the impressions and perceptions that America is better.
These travel advisories now say to Caribbean people: America could be harmful to your health and welfare!
Touché …
Let’s hope these advisories lower the “pull” factors.
The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to provide better optimized Caribbean life (economic and security concerns):
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in Future
Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Consequences of Choices Lie in Future
Page 21
Community Ethos – Privacy –vs- Public Protection
Page 23
Community Ethos – Intelligence Gathering
Page 23
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens
Page 23
Community Ethos – Minority Equalization
Page 24
Community Ethos – Cooperatives
Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations
Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing
Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good
Page 37
Tactical – Confederating a non-sovereign union
Page 63
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy
Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – CU Federal Agencies -vs- Member-states
Planning – Ways to Better Manage the Caribbean Image
Page 133
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy
Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs
Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance
Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract
Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Leadership
Page 171
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice
Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Reduce Crime
Page 178
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security
Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Intelligence Gathering/Analysis
Page 182
Advocacy – Ways to Improve for Natural Disasters – Many flee after disasters
Page 184
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Diaspora
Page 217
Advocacy – Ways to Preserve Caribbean Heritage
Page 218
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights
Page 220
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Urban Living
Page 234
Advocacy – Ways to Impact US Territories
Page 244
If only we had Caribbean member-states giving travel advisories to Caribbean citizens in the past; with warnings like:
Caution: Abandoning your homeland is bad for you … and your homeland.
… or …
Caution: The grass is not greener on the other side.
This subject of “push and pull” has been frequently blogged on in other Go Lean commentaries; as sampled here with these entries muting American “pull” factors:
10 Things We Don’t Want from the US: Racism against immigrants
Underlying to the prime directive of elevating the economics, security and governing engines of the Caribbean, is the desire to make the Caribbean homeland, a better place to live, work and play. We know “bad actors” will emerge – they always do – so travel advisories will continue to be issued on both sides: Caribbean and American. We want proactive and reactive mitigations to ensure our Caribbean communities are safe for our stakeholders (residents and visitors). We entreat the American forces to work towards ensuring safety for our Caribbean citizens when they are visiting or studying in the US. We do not want “bad actors” in either homeland disrupting the peace.
The Go Lean roadmap was composed with the community ethos of the Greater Good foremost; “the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few” (Page 37). All Caribbean stakeholders are hereby urged to lean-in to this roadmap. 🙂
* Appendix – Unusual Advisories on Travel to the United States
News Article Title: 25 Unusual Foreign Travel Warnings for Visiting the U.S. By: Shaunacy Ferro
What do foreign tourists worry about when they visit the U.S.? Expensive emergency healthcare, overly sensitive attitudes towards nude sunbathing, and gross tap water, apparently. That’s according to travel warnings for potential U.S. tourists from around the world. These government-issued advisories can seem like common sense for Americans, but they also reveal significant cultural differences between the U.S. and other countries.
Most countries warn their citizens of America’s high rates of both firearm possession and crime. Don’t anger Americans, several countries subtly hint, lest they have a gun. Many warn visitors to get travel insurance since, unlike at home, they won’t be covered by a national healthcare system should they get injured. Others provide even more specific advice to avoid certain neighborhoods and businesses. Here are 25 unexpected travel warnings from around the world aimed at those visiting the U.S. [(Click here for the actual details of each of these headlines)]:
1. DON’T GET RIPPED OFF AT AN ORLANDO GAS STATION (UK)
If you go to a casino and win in their games of chance, what do you win?
If you go to a casino and lose in their games of chance, what do you lose?
In both cases the answer is money.
This is still true even though the gamer may cash-in the common currency of a country at the start of the session for tokens, chips or e-Cards. The tokens or chips become a nominal or fiat currency themselves; their value is set by the issuer to be any denomination they want – they may choose to make $100 chips Blue, $1000 chips Green and $10,000 chips Red or any combination. The only thing that matters is the cash-out process: when the gamers wants to receive real world currency value for any chips in hand.
Yes, this is the business model of casinos, but it is based on the principles of economics. The quest to reform and transform Caribbean economy could be based on this model; this is the case with the book Go Lean … Caribbean. The book details the mission to elevate the Caribbean societal engines starting with economics, or more simply: money. This brings so many questions to the fore:
What is money and how do we define it? Why must we define it? Aren’t we all familiar with the dynamics of the money or currency in our wallets and purses? How does the common currency fit into this discussion?
First the definition is important so as to dispel the concern about currency as opposed to money; money is not just currency and currency is not just money. Currency relates to a national designation (US dollar, British pounds, Chinese Yuan) or a regional designation like the Euro or the Eastern Caribbean/EC dollar. Money, on the other hand is a matter of four (4) functions[22]:
A Medium – When money is used to intermediate the exchange of goods and services, it is performing a function as a medium of exchange. Money’s most important usage is as a method for comparing the values of dissimilar objects.
A Measure – A unit of account is a standard numerical monetary unit of measurement of the market value of goods, services, and other transactions. Also known as a “measure” or “standard” of relative worth and deferred payment, a unit of account is a necessary prerequisite for the formulation of commercial agreements that involve debt. Money acts as a standard measure and common denomination of trade. It is thus a basis for quoting and bargaining of prices.
A Standard – A “standard of deferred payment” is an accepted way to settle a debt – a unit in which debts are denominated, and the status of money as legal tender, that may function for the discharge of debts. When debts are denominated in money, the real value of debts may change due to inflation and deflation.
A Store – Money acts as a store of value; it must be able to be reliably saved, stored, and retrieved – and be predictably usable as a medium of exchange when it is retrieved. The value of the money must also remain stable over time. Some have argued that inflation, by reducing the value of money, diminishes the ability of money to function as a store of value. Source: Retrieved July 10 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Functions
Casino currencies (tokens, chips and e-Cards) perform all these 4 functions; and more – see the Appendix VIDEO below. The common currency for casino operations can be any currency the operators designate; so why do Caribbean operators always designate US dollars?
This question exposes an Economic Fallacy in the Caribbean region, that significant financial transactions must be in US dollars ($), even in Caribbean casinos. While this must be addressed and remediated, obviously the issues at hand are bigger than just Casino gaming. No, the issues in this commentary address technocratic management for currencies in general.
This commentary is the 6 of 6 from the Go Lean movement on the subject of Economic Fallacies. As related in the previous submissions in this series, the situation in the Caribbean region is likened to the imagery of an animal foraging for food, but then gets distracted and “chases a squirrel up a tree”. The squirrel in the tree will never be a meal; it is just a waste of time and energy for the animal. This analogy conveys the waste of time associated with a frivolous and fallacious pursuit. The other commentaries detailed in this series are as follows:
All of these commentaries are economic in nature. They refer to rules for managing the valuable resources of time, talents and treasuries. There are rules for winning and common mistakes that results in losing. Normally these fallacies are easily discernible after the fact, more so than before hand. So history and good-bad lessons on currency management can be extremely helpful to our Caribbean quest. This is a mission of the Go Lean book, to fortify a strong monetary foundation to ensure forward progress in currency matters in the region.
This book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap to introduce and implement the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) and the Caribbean Central Bank or CCB (a cooperative of central banks), to serve as a regional/super-national entity to shepherd the economic, security and governing engines of the 30 Caribbean member-states. Being technocratic includes studying and applying best-practices, while avoiding fallacies in government oversight. This mission was pronounced in the Go Lean book with this quotation (Page 45):
Fortify the stability of our mediums of exchange, by facilitating our monetary needs through a Currency Union, the Caribbean Dollar (C$), and establishing a Caribbean Central Bank.
There are economic challenges facing the Caribbean, including within the banking community. There is the need for some comprehensive solutions for all of the 30 member-states in the Caribbean. Many of the countries are independent states (16); the remainder are overseas territories of major powers: 6 British, 3 Dutch/Netherlands, 3 French and the 2 American: US Virgin Islands (USVI) and Puerto Rico (PR).
According to the Go Lean book (Page 150), many non-American Caribbean territories – British overseas Territory of the Turks & Caicos Islands, plus the Dutch territories of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, Saba – use the US dollar as their primary currency.
The historicity of central banking in Puerto Rico helps us to understand how the concepts of fiat currencies can be structured to elevate the regional economy. See the encyclopedic reference here regarding this subject:
Title: Puerto Rico and Central Banking Central Banking was established in Puerto Rico during its Spanish colonial days. The island began producing banknotes in 1766, becoming the first colony in the Spanish Empire to print 8-real banknotes with the Spanish government’s approval. After the dissolution of Spain’s New World Empire with the independence of the mainland countries (Mexico, Central and South America, etc), the colonial government in Puerto Rico ordered the issue of provincial banknotes, creating the Puerto Rican peso. However, printing of these banknotes ceased after 1815. During the following decades, foreign coins became the widespread currency. In the 1860s and 1870s, banknotes re-emerged. On February 1, 1890, the Spanish Bank of Puerto Rico (Banco Español de Puerto Rico) was inaugurated and began issuing banknotes, followed 5 year later with peso coins.
On August 13, 1898, the Spanish–American War ended with Spain ceding Puerto Rico to the United States. The Banco Español de Puerto Rico was renamed Bank of Porto Rico and issued bills equivalent to the United States dollar, creating the Puerto Rican dollar. In 1902, the First National Bank of Porto Rico issued banknotes in a parallel manner. Two more series were issued until 1913. After Puerto Rico’s economy and monetary system was fully integrated into the United States’ economic and monetary system, the Puerto Rican dollars were redeemed for those issued by the United States Treasury.
Today, Central Banking in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is expressed through 2 governmental entities, one local and one at the US Federal level. The local entity is the Government Development Bank (GDB) of Puerto Rico. The GDB, established in 1942, is the government bond issuer, intragovernmental bank, fiscal agent, and financial advisor of the government of Puerto Rico.[1][2] The bank, along with its subsidiaries and affiliates, serves as the principal entity through which Puerto Rico channels its issuance of bonds. As an overview from Wikipedia.com, the different executive agencies of the government of Puerto Rico and its government-owned corporations either issue bonds with the bank as a proxy, or owe debt to the bank itself (as the bank is a government-owned corporation as well).
On the US federal basis, Puerto Rico is part of the Second District, Federal Reserve Bank of New York (popularly known as the New York Fed), in its representation before the US Federal Reserve System.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is one of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks of the United States. It is located at 33 Liberty Street, New York, NY. It is responsible for the Second District of the Federal Reserve System, which encompasses New York State, the 12 northern counties of New Jersey, Fairfield County in Connecticut, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Working within the Federal Reserve System, the New York Federal Reserve Bank implements monetary policy, supervises and regulates financial institutions[1] and helps maintain the nation’s payment systems.[2] See Appendix below for more details on the “New York Fed”. Source: Retrieved July 10, 2016 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currencies_of_Puerto_Rico
Puerto Rico is indicative of the dysfunction in the Caribbean region – this Commonwealth is in crisis – despite almost 4 million people on the island, monetary decisions are made in New York City. The Go Lean movement (book and blogs) has consistently maintained that Caribbean problems need Caribbean solutions. The monetary policies for Puerto Rico are being made by the same stakeholders making monetary decisions for the United States. The New York Fed handles 65% of the total Federal Reserve Fedwire transactions; neither PR nor USVI register high on their priorities.
As previously related, the US Territories may have a voice in Washington, but they have no vote. Considering the downward spiral of PR’s economy in recent years, they should not look to others for their long-term solutions. It is a fallacy to think that Caribbean people will be prioritized by foreign masters, thousands of miles away.
Caribbean people – all 30 member-states – need to come to our own aid. The Go Lean book quotes the lyrics from this song:
If there is a load you have to bear
That you can’t carry
I’m right up the road
I’ll share your load
If you just call me
—- Song: Lean On Me; Songwriters: Bill Withers
With the Go Lean roadmap, change will come to the island of Puerto Rico and all the Caribbean. The changes will include a single currency for a Caribbean Single Market, the Caribbean Dollar (C$). There are economic benefits galore. One such benefit is the money multiplier; the Go Lean book (Page 22) defines it as:
In monetary macroeconomics and banking, the money multiplier measures how much the money supply increases in response to a change in the monetary base…. there is a multiplier associated with the currency in the money supply. Therefore it goes without saying that if the Caribbean member-states trade in US dollars, then the multiplier effect is extended to the United States of America. By contrast, if the Caribbean member-states trade in Euros, then the multiplier effect goes to the stakeholders of the European Central Bank – no Caribbean state. Therefore the communities of the Caribbean must embrace, as an ethos, its own currency, the Caribbean Dollar (managed by a technocratic Caribbean Central Bank), thereby bringing local benefits from local multipliers.
Desisting from economic fallacies, there is a dose of reality in the Go Lean roadmap: the US will not allow its territories to wean off the US dollar as the currency base. But there is no controversy if the Caribbean dollar is an electronic currency for PR and USVI.
This is the plan!
The CCB, a cooperative of the existing central banks, will consolidate all reserves for the member central banks. The reserves will be a basket of currencies from the world’s most impactful currencies. Yes, that includes the US, but other currencies too. The roadmap calls for the following basket currencies to constitute Caribbean reserves:
US dollar
British pounds
Euros
Japanese Yen or Chinese Yuans
There is the opportunity for the C$ deployed by the CCB to be an all electronic card/payment system; see photo here. Just like in the foregoing casino scenario, there is only the need to deliver the reserve currency, at cash-out time when an individual or company has to remit the funds in any basket currency outside the Caribbean region.
An all-electronic card would mean local transactions conducted electronically. With the onset of credit cards, debit cards and payment cards in the region as the preferred payment method, this scheme becomes more viable. Electronic settlements also allow for the easy calculation and collection of State Sale Taxes and VAT. Other benefits include:
Free Foreign Exchange to convert back to basket currencies – then cardholders will be more inclined to leave stored value balance on the card.
Free Foreign North-South Remittances: Free for these basket currencies transactions, so as to accumulate balances in the CCB “our” account.
Since casino operations can transact in any fiat currency, the Go Lean roadmap calls for modeling casinos and launching the C$ as a fiat, accounting-value-only currency at first and then eventually to graduate to banknotes and coins. This is the exact model of the Euro currency during its launch. The EU/Euro case study provide lessons – foreign currency, inflation, sovereign defaults – that must be applied in the technocratic administration of the CU/CCB/C$. Since the Go Lean roadmap calls for the CCB to be a cooperative entity of the existing central banks in the region, this will foster interdependence among the Caribbean neighboring member-states. This need for regional stewardship of Caribbean currencies was pronounced early in the book, in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Page 13) with these statements:
xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.
xxv. Whereas the legacy of international democracies had been imperiled due to a global financial crisis, the structure of the Federation must allow for financial stability and assurance of the Federation’s institutions. To mandate the economic vibrancy of the region, monetary and fiscal controls and policies must be incorporated as proactive and reactive measures. These measures must address threats against the financial integrity of the Federation and member-states.
The planners of this new Caribbean monetary regime has documented hard-learned lessons on the issue of currency in the Caribbean region and elsewhere; (many CU member-states endured painful currency fluctuations over the past decades – on more than one occasion). So we accept that any attempt to reboot the Caribbean economic landscape must first start with a strenuous oversight of the proposed regional C$ currency.
The Go Lean book, and previous blog/commentaries, stressed the key community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies necessary to establish a strong Caribbean financial eco-systems and a strong currency. These points are detailed in the book; see this sample from the book as follows:
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices
Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Voluntary Trade Creates Wealth
Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future
Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Money Multiplier
Page 22
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations
Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Return on Investments
Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future – Count on the Greedy to be Greedy
Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good
Page 37
Strategy – Mission – Fortify the Stability of the Securities Markets
Page 45
Strategy – Provide Proper Oversight and Support for the Depository Institutions
Page 46
Strategy – e-Payments and Card-based Transactions
Page 49
Tactical – Growing the Economy – Minimizing Bubbles
The quest of the Go Lean roadmap is to elevate Caribbean society and economic engines from the dysfunctional past. Reliance on the US dollar is a fallacy if we want to grow our economy; transacting in their currency will only expand their economy. We want to be a protégé of the technocratic New York Fed (see the Appendix) – for efficient monetary management – not a parasite! We want to master the process of currency management … and maximize our money supply and available credit. This is heavy-lifting, but “Yes, we can!” We can conceive, believe and achieve workable solutions.
This is the end of the series on Economic Fallacies; this case study of casino currencies is only the latest submission. There have been so many lessons to glean wisdom from in the previous submissions: independence hype, austerity, student loans, minimum wage, centers of economic activities. Let’s pay more than the usual attention to debunking these fallacies in this study of “Advanced Economics”.
All the stakeholders in the Caribbean – people, governments and institutions – are urged to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap for the CU, CCB and the C$. The roadmap serves as turn-by-turn directions to move the region to its new destination: a better homeland to live, work and play. 🙂
Since the founding of the Federal Reserve banking system [in 1913], the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Manhattan’s Financial District has been the place where monetary policy in the United States is implemented, although policy is decided in Washington, D.C. by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The New York Fed is the largest in terms of assets of the twelve regional banks. Operating in the financial capital of the U.S., the New York Fed is responsible for conducting open market operations, the buying and selling of outstanding U.S. Treasury securities.
The Trading Desk is the office at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that manages the FOMC Directive to sell or buy bonds.[6] Note that the responsibility for issuing new U.S. Treasury securities lies with the Bureau of the Public Debt. In 2003, Fedwire, the Federal Reserve’s system for transferring balances between it and other banks, transferred $1.8 trillion a day in funds, of which about $1.1 trillion originated in the Second District. It transferred an additional $1.3 trillion a day in securities, of which $1.2 trillion originated in the Second District. The New York Fed is also responsible for carrying out exchange rate policy by buying and selling dollars at the discretion of the United States Treasury Department. The New York Federal Reserve is the only regional bank with a permanent vote on the Federal Open Market Committee and its president is traditionally selected as the Committee’s vice chairman.
A lot of communities have one spot – a center of economic activity – that must be protected, promoted and regulated. Though they could, these centers do not normally refer to “downtown”. They refer to alternate destinations, like an industrial site (factory, quarry, mine, harbor, etc.), designated district, education campus, medical establishment (hospital or clinic), corporate park and most common in countries with tourism-based economies, a hotel resort property.
That one geographic spot would be the economic engine for the community.
This is an ancient model, dating to times of city walls to protect the inherent commerce. In the modern world, this reality can apply in either urban or rural settings; some small towns are designated “Company Towns” – see the model of Hershey, Pennsylvania in the VIDEO in Appendix A – where the entire community revolves around the one center of economic activity. (For Hershey, first the Chocolate Factory and then the Amusement Park). These centers of economic activities must be protected; but rather than the walls of ancient cities, today the protections are regulations.
A series of fallacies have emerged in regards to protecting economic engines.
We have all heard these one-liners:
1. “I’m from the Federal Government and I’m here to help” – Ronald Reagan tongue-in-cheek Campaign Attack against excessive government regulation; 1980.
2. “Cut taxes on the rich and they will always do the right thing” – Mantra for Trickle Down Economics.
Both of these ‘ultra free market’ principles have been adequately debunked by the actuality of market performance. They are among the economic fallacies that we must now acknowledge … along with this most notable mantra:
3. Industry stakeholders will always observe best-practices and desist from bad practices because damage to their industry will only damage their own bottom-line.
But we all know the truth, the historicity of the events leading up to the 2008 Housing Bubble and Great Recession; these same stakeholders could not resist the temptation for easy profits from the securitization trend.
No doubt, self-regulation is one of the biggest fallacies.
We are able to accurately conclude that self-regulation does not work in banking … because of the way the governments underwrite risk in the banking system. Leading up to 2008, when the Wall Street banks took risks, they gained (profit) from the upside but the taxpayers were the ones left with the costs of bail-outs when things went wrong – Too Big to Fail.
The purpose of the book Go Lean … Caribbean is the elevation of the economic engines in the region. The book serves as a 5 year roadmap to foster new developments and empowerments in the region. To be successful in the execution, there must be some degree of oversight and shepherding. The book refers to an agile regulatory framework structured with technocratic efficiency and effectiveness; and then dubs the strenuous effort as heavy-lifting.
This commentary is the 5 of 6 from the Go Lean movement on the subject of Economic Fallacies. As related in the first submission on this series, the situation in the Caribbean region is likened to the imagery of an animal foraging for food, but then gets distracted and “chases a squirrel up a tree”. The squirrel in the tree will never be a meal; it is just a waste of time and energy for the animal. This analogy conveys the waste of time associated with a frivolous and fallacious pursuit. The other commentaries detailed in this series are as follows:
They refer to rules for managing the valuable resources of time, talents and treasuries. There are rules for winning and rules for losing. Normally these fallacies are discernible after the fact, not before hand. So examining the experience of other communities can be extremely helpful to our Caribbean quest. This is a mission of the Go Lean book, to teach lessons from how other communities have handled economic crises and apply the best-practices in the Caribbean.
This book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap to introduce and implement the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) and Caribbean Central Bank or CCB (a cooperative of central banks), to serve as a regional super-national entity to shepherd the economic, security and governing engines of the 30 member Caribbean states. Being technocratic includes studying and applying best-practices, while avoiding fallacies in governing oversight. There is a lot to learn from the study of self-regulation in the banking industry, especially before, during and after the catastrophic events of 2008 . Now is a good time for this review of crisis as the economy has recovered in some places, though it still lingers in the Caribbean.
Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from making mistakes. There was a lot of mistakes leading up to 2008 – especially in the banking and financial sectors – so there is a lot of wisdom to glean. Among the flawed practices, was the fallacy that the banking industry would self-regulate.
It seems so laughable now. This is why it is important to apply lessons learned from this experience. So in the Go Lean roadmap, self-regulation is replaced with CU/CCB oversight of banking and these controlled centers of economic activity.
In additional to regional banking, the roadmap calls for the installation of centers of economic activity or Self-Governing Entities (SGE) as job-creating engines in many communities; these sites are ideal for technology laboratories, medical campuses, corporate parks, industrial sites, educational facilities and other forms of establishments situated inside bordered facilitates. These types of installations will thrive under the strategies and tactics of the Go Lean roadmap. They allow for an efficient process to launch and manage projects and physical installations in the region, but the SGE concept does require governmental concurrence and maybe even public approvals – referendums – at the launch of these initiatives.
There is a lot of jurisprudence for the management of these centers of economic activity. For example, in the US, company-towns, though private, are still required to fulfill constitutional obligations. The legal concept is termed “state actors”. See the encyclopedic reference on state actors here:
Reference Title: State Actor
In United States law, a state actor is a person [or company] who is acting on behalf of a governmental body, and is therefore subject to regulation under the United States Bill of Rights, including the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which prohibit the federal and state governments from violating certain rights and freedoms.
Although at first blush the term would seem to include only persons who are directly employed by the state, the United States Supreme Court has interpreted these amendments and laws passed pursuant to them to cover many persons who have only an indirect relationship with the government. Controversies have arisen, for example, over whether private companies that run towns (the “company-town”) and prisons (traditionally a state function) can be held liable as state actors when they violate fundamental civil rights. This question remains unresolved, but the Supreme Court has held private citizens to be liable as state actors when they conspire with government officials to deprive people of their rights.
The 1989 case of DeShaney v. Winnebago County was decided on the basis of the state action doctrine. Social workers separated a young son Joshua from his abusive father Randy, but concluded there was not enough evidence for a permanent separation, and later reunited son with father; later, the father beat his son into a persistent vegetative state. The Supreme Court ruled that despite involvement by state social workers, the state of Wisconsin was not a state actor and was therefore not responsible. Accordingly, theFourteenth Amendment protections did not apply, according to constitutional scholar John E. Finn.[1]
Unlike state actors, private actors are generally not required to afford individuals the constitutional rights mentioned above. In nearly all U.S. states, private shopping center owners can eject protesters from their land for trespassing, and private associations can eject members or deny admission to applicants, with no warning and for no reason. But in a handful of states, notably California, state constitutional protections and certain common law rights have been extended to limit private actors. California allows the peaceful exercise of free speech in private shopping centers (see Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins (1980)) and requires certain types of private actors to afford current or potential members a rudimentary version of procedural due process called fair procedure.
There are a number of situations where the United States Supreme Court has recognized the conduct of individuals or private organizations to be “state action,” and therefore subject to provisions of the Constitution such as Equal Protection, Due Process, or the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has held the following:
1. Merely opening up a business to the public is not state action, but the performance of a “public function” (a function that has been traditionally and exclusively performed by the state) is state action (Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946));
2. If an individual or organization merely enters into a contract or asserts a contractual right outside of court it is not state action, but if an individual or organization sues to judicially enforce a contractual right it is state action (Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948));
3. If the government merely acquiesces in the performance of an act by a private individual or organization it is not state action, but if the government coerces, influences, or encourages the performance of the act, it is state action (Rendell-Baker v. Kohn, 457 U.S. 830 (1982));
4. If the government merely enters into a contract with an individual or organization for the goods or services, the actions of the private party are not state action, but if the government and the private party enter into a “joint enterprise” or a “symbiotic relationship” with each other it is state action (Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, 365 U.S. 715 (1961));
5. If government agencies are simply members of a private organization, the actions of the organization are not state action, but if the government is “pervasively entwined” with the leadership of the private organization, the acts of the organization are state action (Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, 535 U.S. 971 (2002)). Source: Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia. Retrieved 07-10-2016 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_actor
Self-Governing Entities are part-and parcel of the prime directives of the Go Lean roadmap, defined by these 3 statements:
Optimization of the economic engines – including SGE’s – in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion in GDP and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus – with regulations and oversight – to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines and centers of economic activity; this reflects the separation-of-powers between CU agencies and member-state governments.
The issue of banking/financial regulation is important for this roadmap. Overseeing the financial elements SGE’s or “centers of economic activity” is also apropos for this Go Lean roadmap.
There is the need to protect SGE’s.
There is the need for (member-state) hands-off oversight for SGE.
How to reconcile these polar opposite positions? See the model here of the European Central Bank response to the dilemma of self-regulation in the Appendix below.
The Go Lean roadmap embraces the practice of technocratic oversight for the region’s economic engines, especially within the borders of SGE’s. As a planning tool, the roadmap commences with a Declaration of Interdependence, pronouncing the need for regional integration (Page 11 & 14) to foster the foundation to forge a better future. The declarative statements are as follows:
xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.
xxi. Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including sciences, languages, arts, music and sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.
xxvi. Whereas the Caribbean region must have new jobs to empower the engines of the economy and create the income sources for prosperity, and encourage the next generation to forge their dreams right at home, the Federation must therefore foster the development of new industries… In addition, the Federation must invigorate the enterprises related to existing industries … – impacting the region with more jobs.
The new banking regime has also been detailed in the Go Lean book. The same Declaration of Interdependence, pronounced the need for the consolidated oversight with these statements (Page 13):
xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.
xxv. Whereas the legacy of international democracies had been imperiled due to a global financial crisis, the structure of the Federation must allow for financial stability and assurance of the Federation’s institutions. To mandate the economic vibrancy of the region, monetary and fiscal controls and policies must be incorporated as proactive and reactive measures. These measures must address threats against the financial integrity of the Federation and of the member-states.
Change has now come to the Caribbean. The driver of this change is technology and globalization. As a region, the Caribbean cannot only consume the tradable products of the world’s markets; we must innovate and develop some products too. The structure of SGE’s are perfectly designed for this endeavor, where innovators and developers can maintain their “own world” so as to foster the best practices for Research & Development (R&D) with no intrusion from municipal or member-state authorities.
These SGE’s will be centers of economic activities for the region. This subject of the promotion of SGE’s has been directly addressed and further elaborated upon in these previous blog/commentaries:
SGE Model: Puerto Rico’s Comprehensive CancerCenter
The Go Lean book envisions the CU/CCB – a confederation of the 30 governments and central banks of the Caribbean member-states – as a charter to do the heavy-lifting of empowering and elevating the Caribbean economy – as the regulator – administrator – overseer of many centers of economic activity within the SGE design. The book details the economic principles and community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to streamline bank regulations and to forge Self-Governing Entities in the Caribbean:
Economic Principles – Deferred Gratification
Page 21
Economic Principles – People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways
Page 21
Economic Principles – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future
Page 21
Economic Principles – Job Multiplier
Page 22
Community Ethos – Lean Operations
Page 24
Community Ethos – Return on Investments (ROI)
Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future
Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius
Page 27
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Research & Development
Page 30
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good
Page 37
Strategy – Agents of Change – Technology
Page 48
Strategic – Staffing – Sporting Events at Fairgrounds
Page 55
Tactical – Confederating a Non-Sovereign Union
Page 63
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy
Page 64
Tactical – Growing Economy – New High Multiplier Industries
Page 68
Tactical – Separation of Powers – CCB: Bank Regulatory & Supervision
Page 73
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Self-Governing Entities – Example of a Space Agency
Page 80
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Fairgrounds Administration – SGE for Sports
Page 83
Implementation – Annexation of French Guiana – Embed the Space Agency as an SGE
Page 98
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities
Page 105
Implementation – Ways to Deliver – Embrace of Project Management Arts & Sciences
Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Better Manage Debt
Page 114
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – # 6: Self-Governing Entities
Page 127
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy
Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs
Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Government
Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Public Works
Page 169
Advocacy – Ways to Promote Fairgrounds
Page 192
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology
Page 197
Advocacy – Reforms for Banking Regulations
Page 199
Advocacy – Ways to Impact “Wall Street” – And the Regional Capital Markets
Page 200
The Go Lean book and accompanying blogs declare that the Caribbean needs to learn lessons from other communities, especially when it comes to common sense regulations. See the Bank Supervision model portrayed in Appendix B – VIDEO.
In retrospect of 2008, the conclusion is that the fallacious self-regulation practice during the build-up of the housing crisis was not common sense. But self-regulation can work in a controlled environment. Now we see that for banking, the controlled environment is assured by keeping the focus on making sure banks bear the costs of the risks they underwrite. This corresponds with the quest of many intra-industry Self-Regulation Organizations.
These Self-regulation Organizations (SROs) can be highly effective enforcers and complement the role of governments, especially in environments where traditional regulators are underfunded; (this is the case with the current Caribbean member-state governments). However, the experts argue, this is only true if the following conditions are met:
The SROs are well-funded;
They are technologically advanced;
There is government oversight of the SRO and the end company;
They are held accountable;
They act within their authority; and
They are structured to avoid conflicts of interest.
As a result of globalization, the tools being used today to coordinate global financial markets regulation are very different than what most professionals learned about in school. In addition, there are ad hoc, informal agreements, rulemaking and codes of ethics that are more commonly being relied upon as opposed to arduously negotiated international treaties. This is why the oversight of the region’s banks is designated for the CCB and the regulation of SGE’s are designed for the lean technocratic CU Trade Federation. These moves will assuredly bring the benefits of SGE’s (jobs) to the Caribbean.
Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people, institutions and governments to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. We need to dissuade the economic fallacies, and engage the best-practices throughout the region. These executions will make the Caribbean region a better place to live, work and play. 🙂
Uploaded on Aug 31, 2007 – Company towns have often been depicted as locations of worker exploitation. The 1950s song, Sixteen Tons, popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford (and easily found on the web) reinforces that idea. Hershey, Pennsylvania had a different reputation, however. But it did not escape the labor unrest that swept the U.S. in the 1930s.
Published on Jan 8, 2015 – Healthy banks and healthy economies go hand in hand. The latest in the Atlanta Fed’s animated video series explains how the Federal Reserve ensures banks are doing business safely and providing fair and equitable services to their communities.
—————-
Appendix C – Monitoring, regulation and self-regulation in the European banking sector
Speech by Sabine Lautenschläger, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB and Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board of the Single Supervisory Mechanism, at the evening reception at the Deutsche Aktieninstitut in Frankfurt am Main, 21 April 2015;retrieved July 10, 2016 from: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2015/html/sp150421.en.html
Do we need to do more to make sure that we never have to experience another financial market and banking crisis like that in 2008-09, or have we done too much and thus prevented the European banking industry from being able to offer financial services to the real economy?
After a long phase of deregulation, a comprehensive re-regulation has been in vogue since 2009. At the global, European and national level, we have tackled almost everything that can limit, reduce or prevent risks to and risks caused by banks. The general public, politicians, academics, supervisors and even bankers – simply everyone – called for comprehensive and tough rules for banks and for their close supervision. But the mood seems to have changed over the past year. In Germany and Europe, more and more people are complaining of overregulation. In the rest of Europe, a connection is being made between the words “credit crunch” and “regulation”.
Many people yearn for a pause in regulation, would perhaps rather leave the market to regulate itself – rely on self-regulation.
…
Conclusions
I don’t think that you were much surprised by my saying that I don’t think much of lax regulation. Given the obvious tendency towards exaggeration and erroneous developments in financial markets, and the potential damage for the economy and society, good regulations are an indispensable prerequisite for ensuring that the financial sector is able to function properly in the long term. …
There are lessons that the Caribbean need to learn about minimum wages:
In the long run, it makes no difference in buying power.
If wages are increased – as in an universal minimum wage increase – then inflationary forces would kick in and consumer prices will also adjust upwards. So as a government policy, raising the minimum wage is an economic fallacy.
This relates to the topic in the field of Economics related to the Phillips Curve. This empirical model establishes that there is a ‘short run’ trade-off between unemployment and inflation but this is not been observed in the long run. The textbook definition of the Phillips Curve is as follows:
The Phillips curve is a single-equation empirical model, named after A. W. Phillips, describing a historical inverse relationship between rates of unemployment and corresponding rates of inflation that result within an economy. Stated simply, decreased unemployment, (i.e., increased levels of employment) in an economy will correlate with higher rates of inflation.
While there is a short run trade-off between unemployment and inflation, it has not been observed in the long run.[1] In 1968, Milton Friedman asserted that the Phillips curve was only applicable in the short-run and that in the long-run, inflationary policies will not decrease unemployment.[2][3] Friedman then correctly predicted that, in the 1973–75 recession, both inflation and unemployment would increase.[3] The long-run Phillips Curve is now seen as a vertical line at the natural rate of unemployment, where the rate of inflation has no effect on unemployment.[4] Accordingly, the Phillips curve is now seen as too simplistic, with the unemployment rate supplanted by more accurate predictors of inflation based on velocity of moneysupply measures such as the MZM (“money zero maturity”) velocity,[5] which is affected by unemployment in the short but not the long term.[6]
Key: NAIRU = Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment
This subject matter synchronizes with the book Go Lean…Caribbean, which calls for the elevation of Caribbean economics. The book asserts that the Caribbean has to pursue a quest for job creation, but to set the sights on a higher target, high-paying jobs, because minimum wage jobs are no elevation at all; it is only a fallacy. As conveyed in a previous blog-commentary, the Go Lean book examined the anatomy of minimum wages (Page 152) and its effect on a community’s eco-system. It defined minimum wage as:
… the lowest hourly, daily or monthly remuneration that employers may legally pay to workers …
The minimum wage is generally acknowledged to increase the standard of living of workers, reduces poverty, reduces inequality, boosts morale and forces businesses to be more efficient. Critics of the minimum wage, predominantly followers of neo-classical economic theory, contend that a minimum wage increases unemployment, particularly among workers with very low productivity due to inexperience or handicap, thereby harming less skilled workers and possibly excluding some groups from the labor market …
This fallacy of minimum wage is commentary 4 of 6 in this series on Economic Fallacies from the movement behind the Go Lean book. As related in the first submission on this series, the situation in the Caribbean region is likened to the imagery of an animal foraging for food, but then gets distracted and “chases a squirrel up a tree”. The squirrel in the tree will never be a meal; it is just a waste of time and energy for the animal. This analogy conveys the waste of time associated with a frivolous and fallacious pursuit. The other commentaries detailed in this series are as follows:
All of the commentaries in this series are economic in nature. They refer to rules for managing the valuable resources of time, talents and treasuries. The creation of jobs require a measure of all three of these resources. A mission of the Go Lean roadmap is to create jobs in the region. The roadmap – for a total of 370 pages – presents a comprehensive plan to create 2.2 million new jobs, with a heavy focus on high paying jobs, exhausting the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics / Medical (STEM) fields.
This subject is no childs-play; this is heavy-lifting. There are supplemental teaching points that align with this subject.This is gleaned from a Khan Academy’s online/e-Learning teaching course:
What is the relationship between the aggregate demand curve and the Phillips curve?
At first, unemployment will go down, shifting aggregate demand (AD) from AD1 to AD2, which increases Y (output) by Y2 – Y1. This increase in demand means more workers are needed, and then AD will be shifted from AD2 to AD3. However, this time, much less is produced than in the previous shift, but the price level has risen from P2 to P3, which is a much higher increase in price than in the previous shift. The increase in price is called inflation. – Khan Academy Lesson
Question: As much as the increase in demand would affect inflation wouldn’t another and maybe more obvious explanation be that as wages raise the costs of producing increase (since labor most often is a very important production factor) and thus forcing companies to increase prices as to offset the increase in wages?
Answer: Increase in price won’t always lead to increase in profit, because it entails decrease in demand in a highly competitive market. It will do so when there is so much money in the economy that demand becomes insensitive to price, or when profit is marginal. The former factor takes place first, the later – second.
VIDEO – Phillips curve – Inflation – measuring the cost of living – Macroeconomics – Khan Academy – https://youtu.be/v7ZWTZ9NgU4
Uploaded on Feb 15, 2012 – The observation that inflation and unemployment tend to be inversely correlated.
The book Go Lean … Caribbean calls for the elevation of Caribbean economics using sound economic principles and best-practices, not the pursuits of economic fallacies. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) with the charter to facilitate jobs in the region. The book posits that STEM industries and careers can be a great equalizer for the Caribbean to better compete with the rest of the world. These jobs are not location dependent. There is only the need for the “community will”. This job-creation mantra is among these 3 prime directives of the CU/Go Lean roadmap:
Optimization of economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to a GDP of $800 Billion.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.
Early in the Go Lean book, the responsibility to create jobs was identified as an important function for the CU with these pronouncements in the Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 14):
xxvi. Whereas the Caribbean region must have new jobs to empower the engines of the economy and create the income sources for prosperity, and encourage the next generation to forge their dreams right at home, the Federation must therefore foster the development of new industries, like that of ship-building, automobile manufacturing, prefabricated housing, frozen foods, pipelines, call centers, and the prison industrial complex. In addition, the Federation must invigorate the enterprises related to existing industries tourism, fisheries and lotteries – impacting the region with more jobs.
xxvii. Whereas the region has endured a spectator status during the Industrial Revolution, we cannot stand on the sidelines of this new economy, the Information Revolution. Rather, the Federation must embrace all the tenets of Internet Communications Technology (ICT) to serve as an equalizing element in competition with the rest of the world. The Federation must bridge the digital divide and promote the community ethos that research/development is valuable and must be promoted and incentivized for adoption.
xxviii. Whereas intellectual property can easily traverse national borders, the rights and privileges of intellectual property must be respected at home and abroad. The Federation must install protections to ensure that no abuse of these rights go with impunity, and to ensure that foreign authorities enforce the rights of the intellectual property registered in our region.
Job creation has been a frequent topic for blog/commentaries. Consider this sample list:
The book Go Lean…Caribbean details the creation of 2.2 million new jobs for the Caribbean region, many embracing STEM skill-sets. How? By adoption of certain community ethos – that “community will” – plus the executions of key strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies. The following is a sample from the book:
Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification
Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives
Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future
Page 21
Community Ethos – Job Multiplier
Page 22
Community Ethos – Lean Operations
Page 24
Community Ethos – Return on Investments
Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future
Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship
Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Intellectual Property
Page 29
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Research & Development
Page 30
Community Ethos – Ways to Bridge the Digital Divide
Page 31
Strategy – Mission – Education Without Further Brain Drain
Page 46
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy
Page 64
Tactical – Tactics to Forge an $800 Billion Economy – High Multiplier Industries
Page 70
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Commerce Department – Patents & Copyrights
Page 78
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change
Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Deliver
Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Impact ICT and Social Media
Page 111
Planning – Ways to Improve Trade
Page 128
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs
Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Education
Page 159
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Labor Markets and Unions
Page 164
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology
Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Main Street
Page 201
Advocacy – Ways to Battle Poverty – Third World Realities
Page 222
Advocacy – Ways to Help the Middle Class
Page 223
Appendix – Growing 2.2 Million Jobs in 5 Years
Page 257
Appendix – Job Multipliers
Page 259
The CU will foster job-creating developments for above minimum-wage jobs, by incentivizing many “innovation sector” jobs: high-tech start-ups, incubating viable companies, and implementing Self-Governing Entities. The primary ingredient for CU success will be Caribbean people, so we must foster and incite participation of many young people into innovation sectors or STEM fields. This quest is the opposite of the minimum wage fallacious pursuit observed in many Caribbean countries who prioritize tourism and tourism-related service jobs.
Of the 2.2 million new jobs in the Go Lean roadmap, there is no expectation that all jobs will be in the innovation sector and above the minimum wage. No, service industries will always persists, and these frequently feature a minimum wage scale. But these jobs will not be the focus nor the target of the Go Lean heavy-lifting. They will simply be the derivatives of the innovation sector jobs. This derivative enjoys a job multiplier effect; for every direct job, additional ones are fostered “down stream”. The Go Lean book details this dynamic; consider this sample from Page 259:
With only a fraction of the jobs, the innovation sector generates a disproportionate number of additional local jobs and therefore profoundly shapes the local economy. A healthy traded sector benefits the local economy directly, as it generates well-paid jobs, and indirectly as it creates additional jobs in the non-traded sector. What is truly remarkable is that this indirect effect to the local economy is much larger than the direct effect. My research, based on an analysis of 11 million American workers in 320 metropolitan areas, shows that for each new high-tech job in a metropolitan area, five additional local jobs are created outside of high tech in the long run. – Enrico Moretti’s.
The roadmap anticipates only a 3.75 job multiplier factor in the estimation of the 2.2 million new jobs.
Everyone is hereby urged to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap, so that we can create the high-paying, community-impacting jobs, and not consume ourselves with a focus on minimum-wage jobs. How to accomplish this heavy-lifting tasks? This roadmap provides the turn-by-turn directions. This is an action plan to not just improve the Caribbean workplace, but the entire homeland. To make this, our homeland, a better place to live, work and play. 🙂
This is not so unfamiliar a phrase in pop culture. It refers to the everyday scenario of repaying a debt. People want to be re-paid what is owed them. Many times, the motivation for street crimes is the defaulting of a debt – legitimate or illicit. Even more so, countries have gone to war over debt defaults; consider the experience of the Mexican – French Drama, better known as “Cinco De Mayo”. (The book Go Lean … Caribbean also relates the bad experiences of the Egyptian Default in the 1870’s – Page 143).
There are standards of quality that we all accept when it comes to debt collection; it is like a yardstick of success. That figure is 10 percent. Any lending institution with a default rate higher than 10% is automatically considered a failure. Many times, the institution – like banks – would come under external supervision for sporting such a default rate.
For the American student loans eco-system, the default rate has remained consistently below 10 percent, (now after the implementation of collections best practices in the 1990’s), even during dire economic conditions. Though there have been complaints of upward creeping, that argument is all relative; see chart here:
According to the following news article, the Caribbean experience is “bad” for gleaning returns from their student loans, even as a straight banking product: principal & interest dynamics. How bad? 10 percent? That would be a dream; the experience in one country, the Bahamas is 75 percent for student loans. See the news article to this effect here:
Title: Bahamas government warns student loan defaulters of legal action
NASSAU, The Bahamas – Minister of Education, Science and Technology Jerome Fitzgerald has put recipients of the Education Loan Programme (ELP) on notice that if they fail to repay their loans they will face court action.
Despite the many “success” stories coming out of the ELP, he maintained that there were also a number of failings which have “derailed” the programme.
Since passage of the Act in 2002, a total of 4,733 people have benefited from the programme. But the initiative was suspended in August 2009 because of a 75 per cent delinquency rate in loan repayments.
“This was and is clearly unsustainable. The people of the Bahamas financed this programme to assist with the education of persons pursuing tertiary education. The loan portfolio is intended to be a revolving fund; and as the borrower pays, the monies are repaid to assist other qualified students,” Fitzgerald said at a press conference yesterday.
“I must emphasize that many loan recipients have satisfied and are satisfying their commitments. There are many more, however, for a plurality of reasons, who have not. We are aware that many persons who received loans have returned home and are not working. We are also equally aware that there is a possibility that a number of persons who received funds between 2000 and 2002 may not have ever attended school. However, we are cognizant of our fiduciary responsibility to the country and that we had to formulate a plan that would sensibly facilitate our pursuit to collect delinquent funds, one way or the other.”
Fitzgerald explained that, with a view of jumpstarting the programme, the ELA was mandated to review the suspended it with the intention of making recommendations to restarting to give an opportunity to qualified persons interested in pursuing tertiary education.
He said that after three years of reviewing and reconciling records, the Education Loan Authority now has a formula to address and correct the deficiencies of the ELP.
“I can assure that the Directors and Management of the Education Loan Authority (ELA) were instructed to work fastidiously, to come up with a solution to . . . not only restore the programme, but to restore the programme with the necessary control provisions to ensure its ongoing sustainability and viability,” the minister said.
Fitzgerald re-emphasized government’s position that “one of the prerequisites for successfully delivering our commitment to the creation of an effective transition path from high school into higher education had to be the restoration of the Scholarship Loan Programme.”
On October 21, 2015 the Education Loan (Amendment) Act 2015 came into force. In addition to collecting funds, the new Act addresses delinquencies, rewards borrowers who are paying and/or genuinely want to honour their obligations, and empowers the ELA to collect funds.
In summary, the Bahamas Education Loan Authority (ELA) is owed over $155 million in outstanding loan payments for its student loan scheme, with a default rate of 75 percent.
This Caribbean community should now be saying: “Give me my money!”
However, this commentary extends the criticism further: The money being demanded is the principal and maybe even some interest amounts due. But student loans are supposed to be investments in the young people of the community. This commentary trumpets the reality of Caribbean student loans as a fallacy: Where is the return on these investments?
This commentary asserts that those who advocate to remediate Caribbean economics needs to avoid a series of Economic Fallacies. This is commentary 3 of 6 from the movement behind the Go Lean book on the subject of Economic Fallacies. As related in the first submission on this series, the situation in the Caribbean region is likened to the imagery of an animal foraging for food, but then gets distracted and “chases a squirrel up a tree”. The squirrel in the tree will never be a meal; it is just a waste of time and energy for the animal. This analogy conveys the waste of time associated with a frivolous and fallacious pursuit. The other commentaries detailed in this series are as follows:
All of the commentaries in this series are economic in nature. They refer to rules for managing the valuable resources of time, talents and treasuries. Student loan investments are extending all three of these resources. Despite the direct reference to this one Caribbean member-states – the Bahamas – the experience is similar through out the entire region: Student loans have been a bad investment; lose-lose for the community. A mission of the roadmap gleaned from the Go Lean book, is to remediate the economic chaos in the region.
Back to the Bahamas, in addition to a terrible loan default rate where they report only 16 percent of borrowers are up to date on their loan payments; the problem is exacerbated by an atrocious brain drain rate. Some studies present that 70 percent of college educated ones in the Caribbean in general have fled the region for residency abroad. (The Bahamas rate was 61 percent in that report). Surely investments in student loans as a nation-building policy is an economic fallacy … for the Bahamas in particular and the Caribbean region in general.
The problem is not just a Caribbean one. Other communities also experience dysfunction in their student loan eco-system. For example, in the US, the average student loan debt for recent college graduates is close to $30,000; any loans guaranteed by the US Federal government is non-dischargeable, so even after death or bankruptcy, the indebtedness remains. This type of debt impedes the individual from making methodical progress, and the experience on community economics have been imperiled. In a previous blog-commentary, it was reported how the student loan crisis has impacted the home-buying practice.
So the best practice for students, who have partaken in a loan program, is to strategize a repayment; see related article in the Appendix. There are economic consequences for the individual and the community.
Education is good!
Student loans are bad!
The entire college education eco-system has had mixed results for the Caribbean.
Part of the Caribbean’s dismal record with college education is tied to the reality of college graduates abandoning the homeland, or never returning after their matriculation. This consideration aligns with the book Go Lean…Caribbean, a roadmap to elevate the economic, security and governing engines of the Caribbean. The Caribbean wants to model many of the good examples of the United States, and learn from the many bad cautionary tales. Education is a good model; (every additional year of schooling – in the aggregate – raises a community’s economic output by 3% to 6%). On the other hand, the eco-system for student loans is one bad American model we do not want to emulate. The Go Lean book detailed the new debt crisis America is contending with because of the excessive debt loads, young ones are being burden with (Page 114). Here is an excerpt:
The Bottom line on a New Student Loan Scandal Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone magazine contributing editor, had previously exposed the 2008 Wall Street Crisis in his critically acclaimed book Too Big To Fail. Now he exposes as scandalous how American colleges exploit young students with outrageous tuition increases (3 X the inflation rate), since all are approved for federal student loans. Where there is demand, a supply system steps in to deliver … and profit. But this industry creates its own demand with slick marketing campaigns. See Appendix IH of Go Lean … Caribbean – Page 286.
Already too, the Caribbean has its own bad experiences within its own student loan eco-system. The Caribbean experience has been more negative than positive. Too many of our students have left … to study abroad; then refused to return home, taking with them the return on community investments and repayment of their student loans. We must do better! A Go Lean/CU mission is to dissuade our citizens from emigrating to foreign shores.
This Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The CU has a complete education agenda, applying lessons learned from the consideration of other communities, like the US. This roadmap presents the following 3 prime directives:
Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs..
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.
Again, education is good. So the Go Lean roadmap provides turn-by-turn directions on how to reform the Caribbean tertiary education systems, economy, governance and Caribbean society as a whole. There is a plan for a regional student loan pool, where we mitigate the dangers that are so evident in the American eco-system.
As for the primary threat of constant societal abandonment – of crisis proportions – the Go Lean roadmap has missions to remediate this crisis. So as a planning tool, the roadmap commences with a Declaration of Interdependence, pronouncing the dread of threats and Caribbean brain drain (Page 12):
xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.
xix. Whereas our legacy in recent times is one of societal abandonment, it is imperative that incentives and encouragement be put in place to first dissuade the human flight, and then entice and welcome the return of our Diaspora back to our shores …
xxi. Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group… This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.
So a tertiary education plan, without addressing the preponderance of brain drain is another economic fallacy. We, as a community, would be spending good money, but getting bad returns.
Make no mistake, the Go Lean movement (book and accompanying blog-commentaries) posits that education is a vital consideration for Caribbean economic empowerment. Imagine better regional institutions with conditional loans with cross-border enforcement and collections. The vision of the CU is a confederation of the 30 member-states of the Caribbean to do this type of heavy-lifting to champion better educational policies for our region.
The book details the policies; the community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of the following strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to impact the tertiary education in the region:
Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification
Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choice
Page 21
Community Ethos – Job Multiplier
Page 22
Community Ethos – Lean Operations
Page 24
Community Ethos – Return on Investments (ROI)
Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future
Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius
Page 27
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship – Training & Mentoring
Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Research and Development – STEM Education
Page 30
Strategy – Competition Analysis – Study: At home –vs- Abroad
Page 50
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Education Department
Page 85
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Labor Department – On-the-Job-Training Regulator
Page 89
Implementation – Ways to Better Manage Debt
Page 114
Planning – Lessons Learned from Egypt
Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy
Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs
Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Education
Page 159
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Student Loans – How to Reboot
Page 160
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance
Page 169
Appendix – Education and Economic Growth
Page 258
Appendix – New American Student Loan Debt Crisis – Now Over $ 1 Trillion in Debt
Page 286
The American Tertiary Education Student Loan eco-system is a broken model. This constitutes a fallacy for the Caribbean to emulate it. This point, and other fallacies related to education, have been repeatedly addressed and further elaborated upon by this Go Lean movement, as in these previous blog/commentaries:
Is a Traditional 4-year Degree a Terrible Investment?
Let’s do better here in the Caribbean. Better than our American model – see the VIDEO in the Appendix – and better than our own status quo. Let’s own up to the hurtful fact that tertiary education – and the student loans to finance them – has been an economic fallacy! We have been chasing “the squirrel up the tree and then waiting with futility for it to come down”. The Caribbean expression is so apropos here:
Fattening frog for snake.
There is a better way!
The people, educational and governing institutions in the region are urged to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. Education reform – weeding out the fallacies – can succeed in elevating Caribbean society; we can make the homeland better places to live, work, learn and play. 🙂
Published on Oct 28, 2015 – Student Loans! Whether you hate them or hate them, you’re probably going to have to deal with them in one way or another. Why? Because over 40 Million young(ish) Americans owe over 1.2 Trillion dollars in student loan debt and millions of others have this spectre of debt loom over crucial life decisions. And while there are no easy answers about what to do about it, there are a lot of good questions like: Why has tuition across the United States skyrocketed over the past 30 years? What are your student loans really paying for? Is there anything you can do? And perhaps most importantly, is this all just a bunch of Bullshit?
The average student loan debt for recent college graduates is close to $30,000. During the first five years after college, four out of 10 borrowers become delinquent in repaying their student loans. This can lead to extra fees and interest costs, as well as a major hit to one’s credit rating. If you are a college graduate who is struggling to keep up with payments, these tips can help.
Understand the terms of your loan(s). Chances are, you have more than one loan with different lenders. As a result, your options for loan repayment will vary. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Student Loan Data Systemprovides loan amounts, lender information and repayment status for all government-funded federal student loans. Private student loans are financed through a bank, credit union or other nongovernmental lender. Private lenders set their own interest rates, loan limits and other conditions. You will need to contact your private lender directly to obtain full details on the terms of your loan.
Consider consolidation. It is challenging to keep track of multiple loan payments. Consolidating your student loans will create a more convenient single monthly payment. Consolidation does increase the term of the loan and the amount of interest paid over the life of the loan. However, by extending the repayment term, it can reduce your monthly payments by almost half.
Figure out your repayment plan. Some loans have a grace period of six to nine months before the first payment is due. Depending on the loan type, interest may or may not accrue during this period. Having a little bit of breathing room after graduation can be helpful as you find and start a job. However, it also makes it easy to forget that a payment is due. Up to a third of borrowers miss their first student loan payment. Your credit rating can take a hit with just one missed payment. Automatic payments set up through your bank checking account can ensure you meet your financial obligation each month. Some lenders offer discounts for these automatic debits, too.
Do not default. Should you find yourself unable to make loan payments due to a job loss or other circumstances, it is always better to work with your lender to find a repayment solution than to default. Penalties for defaulting on student loans can be severe. They can include garnished wages and Social Security benefits, and government retention of tax refunds. In addition, you may incur late fees and collection charges. Instead of defaulting, consider these other options:
Deferment. If you qualify, you can temporarily halt payments on the loan principal by applying for a loan deferment with your lender. During this time, the federal government will pay the interest on subsidized federal student loans, but not unsubsidized loans.
Forbearance. A forbearance allows you to temporarily modify your loan terms by stopping or reducing monthly payments, or extending the repayment time period. Depending on your situation, you may or may not have to pay interest on the loan during a period of forbearance.
Forgiveness. Loan forgiveness programs eliminate loan balances (and payments) for people who meet certain criteria. These include working in eligible public service positions, such as in law enforcement or public health; military service; volunteer work; and teaching or practicing medicine in a low-income, rural area.
Cancellation. In extreme cases, such as disability, you may be able to get your loans discharged.
If you are still in school, make sure you complete an exit counseling session with a financial aid officer at your school before your graduate. This representative will review the terms and conditions of your loans, including repayment options and your rights and responsibilities. This is the time to ask questions and map out a plan for repayment. Then you can focus on the really important tasks like landing that dream job and starting your bright future.
About the Author Andrew Housser is a co-founder and CEO of Bills.com, a free one-stop online portal where consumers can educate themselves about personal finance issues and compare financial products and services. He also is co-CEO of Freedom Financial Network, LLC providing comprehensive consumer credit advocacy and debt relief services. Housser holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University and Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College.
The economic status in the Caribbean – all 30 member-states despite the colonial legacy – can be summed up with one word:
Crisis!
Alas, the book Go Lean…Caribbean declares that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
This commentary relates the below Book Review of the publication by Economist and Political Scientist Mark Blyth entitled: Austerity – The History of a Dangerous Idea. This commentary asserts that those who advocate to remediate Caribbean economics needs to avoid a series of Economic Fallacies.
This is commentary 2 of 6 from the Go Lean movement on the subject of Economic Fallacies. As related in the previous submissions on this series, the situation in the Caribbean region is likened to the imagery of an animal foraging for food, but then gets distracted and “chases a squirrel up a tree”. The squirrel in the tree will never be a meal; it is just a waste of time and energy for the animal. This analogy conveys the waste of time associated with a frivolous and fallacious pursuit. The other commentaries detailed in this series are as follows:
All of these commentaries are economic in nature. They refer to rules for managing the valuable resources of time, talents and treasuries. There are rules for winning and rules for losing. Normally these are discovered after the fact, not before hand. So examining the experience of other communities, the winners and losers, can be extremely helpful to our Caribbean cause. This is a mission of the Go Lean roadmap, to learn lessons from how other communities have handled economic crises.
One common remediation for economic crisis has been Austerity. What is Austerity? And is this a good thing or bad thing? First, the dictionary definition is: “reduced availability of luxuries and consumer goods, as brought about by government policy”. Second, consider Mark Blyth’s own definition, here:
The Book Review and VIDEO on Mark Blyth’s Austerity book is as follows:
Book Review: Austerity – The History of a Dangerous Idea By: Mark Blyth
Selected as aFinancial TimesBest Book of 2013 Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts–austerity–to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer.
That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn’t work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.
About the Author
Mark Blyth is associate professor of political science at the JohnsHopkinsUniversity and the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century.
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Editorial Reviews
“Austerity is an economic policy strategy, but is also an ideology and an approach to economic management freighted with politics. In this book Mark Blyth uncovers these successive strata. In doing so he wields his spade in a way that shows no patience for fools and foolishness.”
— Barry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science University of California, Berkeley
——-
“Of all the zombie ideas that have been reanimated in the wake of the global financial crisis, austerity is the most dangerous. Mark Blyth shows how austerity created the disasters of the 1930s, and contributed to the descent of the world into global war. He shows how European austerity policies have prevented any recovery from the crisis of 2009, while rescuing and protecting the banks and financial institutions that created the crisis. An essential guide for anyone who wants to understand the current depression.”
— John Quiggin, author of author of Zombie Economics
——-
“Most fascinating is the author’s discussion of the historical underpinnings of austerity, first formulated by Enlightenment thinkers Locke, Hume and Adam Smith, around the (good) idea of parsimony and the (bad) idea of debt. Ultimately, writes Blyth, austerity is a ‘zombie economic idea because it has been disproven time and again, but it just keeps coming.’ A clear explanation of a complicated, and severely flawed, idea.” — KIRKUS REVIEW
——-
‘One of the especially good things in Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea is the way he traces the rise and fall of the idea of “expansionary austerity,” the proposition that cutting spending would actually lead to higher output. EL As Blyth documents, this idea spread like wildfire.’ — Paul Krugman, The New York Review of Books
——-
“Among all the calamities spawned by the global financial crisis, none was as easily avoidable as the idea that austerity policies were the only way out. In this feisty book, noted political scientist Mark Blyth covers new territory by recounting the intellectual history of this failed idea and how it came to exert a hold on the imagination of economists and politicians. It is an indication of the sorry state of macroeconomics that it takes a political scientist to expose so thoroughly one of the economics profession’s most dangerous delusions.”
— Dani Rodrik, Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy, The John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Published on Mar 27, 2013 – Governments the world over are looking at austerity measures to help battle the financial crisis. Author and Ivy League professor Mark Blyth tells Steve Paikin why he thinks this is a bad idea.
The Go Lean book details the economic crisis stemming from the 2008 Great Recession. But the book prepares societal engines of the Caribbean so as to not waste this crisis; it calls for the establishment of a regional administration to monitor, mitigate and manage the economic dynamics of the region. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The prime directives of this federal entity are described as:
Optimize the economic engines of the Caribbean to elevate the regional economy to grow to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establish a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance and industrial policies to support these engines.
So the Go Lean roadmap calls for the CU to serve as the regional administration to optimize banking and sovereign debt in the region. Part of the CU roadmap is the accompanying Caribbean Central Bank. (CCB). The premise of the book is simple: that the problems of the region are too big for any one member-state to resolve alone. This point was pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence in the Go Lean book (Pages 12 – 13) with these statements:
xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.
xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.
xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.
xxv. Whereas the legacy of international democracies had been imperiled due to a global financial crisis, the structure of the Federation must allow for financial stability and assurance of the Federation’s institutions. To mandate the economic vibrancy of the region, monetary and fiscal controls and policies must be incorporated as proactive and reactive measures. These measures must address threats against the financial integrity of the Federation and of the member-states.
The Go Lean/CU/CCB roadmap is designed to deliver many empowerment activities to elevate Caribbean society. These activities will carefully balance the obligations of the past (debt) and the needs of the Caribbean future: we need growth and jobs … now. Debt is really just other people’s money; which always come with strings attached, as in repayment in a foreign currency … with interest.
What exactly is the Go Lean plan to counter the economic fallacy of austerity?
Economic growth …
… as in creating jobs through industrial and entrepreneurial endeavors – for a grand total of 2.2 million new jobs.
How is this different from previous administrations?
Technocratic administration for an economy of $800 Billion GDP; just consider these two strategies: Exclusive Economic Zones and Self Governing Entities.
Exclusive Economic Zones will facilitate both economic empowerment (like Fisheries management) and security assurances for the territories between the islands and the outer reaches of the Caribbean Sea. – Go Lean book (Page 104).
SGE’s are necessary features of the CU roadmap, allowing for industrial parks, technology labs, medical campuses, agricultural ventures, airport cities and even the Capital District. All aspects of their administration are managed by the CU, including monetary issues managed by the Caribbean Central Bank. – Go Lean book (Page 105).
The cautionary tales of austerity-like measures have been repeatedly addressed and further elaborated upon in these previous blog/commentaries:
Reform at the brink of disaster, only at the precipice
The CU is designed to do the heavy-lifting of organizing Caribbean society to benefit from the lessons from austerity measures and the underlying sovereign and municipal personal debt crises of other communities. Since the purpose of austerity is to impact economic turn-around, it is important to fully dissect the anatomy of austerity programs. This was the goal and successful execution of the book in the foregoing Book Review; austerity is an economic fallacy. This goal is also a mission of the Go Lean book as it details the community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of the following strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to impact the economic turn-around of Caribbean communities:
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices
Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Voluntary Trade Creates Wealth
Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future
Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Money Multiplier
Page 23
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations
Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Return on Investments
Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future – Count on the Greedy to be Greedy
Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good
Page 37
Strategy – Mission – Fortify the Stability of the Securities Markets
Page 45
Strategy – Provide Proper Oversight and Support for the Depository Institutions
Page 46
Tactical – Growing the Economy – Minimizing Bubbles
Appendix – Airport Cities – Models for Self Governing Entities
Page 287
Appendix – Tool-kits for Capital Controls
Page 315
The Go Lean roadmap posits that change is coming to the Caribbean; we do not want to be over-dependent on other people’s money – that means answering to other people’s demands. As the title of Mark Blyth’s book concludes: its a dangerous idea. This has been the campaign of the Go Lean movement, to pursue economic growth, not debt. The movement (book and blog-commentaries) have even trumpeted a solution for the current public debt – no austerity, rather robust capital markets using a single Caribbean currency. Change is afoot!
The summary of the book in the foregoing Book Review is that austerity as a turn-around strategy is a dangerous idea, an economic fallacy. It is not a best-practice. The best way to correct economic stagnation and recession is simply growth! Period!
Aggressive debt repayment should only be pursued during periods of growth.
With the Go Lean roadmap, change has come to our region. But there is the need for a permanent union to provide efficient stewardship for Caribbean economy, security and governing engines. There must be the constant balancing act between past debt obligations and future growth. The Go Lean…Caribbean book posits that this challenge is a direct result of agents of change facing the modern world, as in globalization. This challenge is too big for just any one member-state to tackle alone, so there must be a regional solution. This is the quest of the multi-state technocratic administration of the CU.
The people and institutions of the region are hereby urged to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap, to embrace the economic turn-around and avoid austerity. Only then, can we make the Caribbean a better homeland to live, work and play. 🙂
Now after the Fourth of July – American Independence Holiday – we focus on the many Caribbean member-states that are celebrating their independence in the next weeks and months. See list of Independence Dates in the Appendix below.
For a long time, independence was ‘all the rage’; but was it hope or just hype? With a world-wide emphasis on globalization, this commentary posits that the ‘rage’ needs to be interdependence. That African proverb rings so loudly:
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
So, it is the assessment of this commentary that Independence is so overrated; rather than independence, the call is for interdependence. A model of this desired interdependence is the inter-state cooperation in the European Union (EU). But even that modeled structure is now in jeopardy …
… as a referendum in Britain (actually all of the United Kingdom) on exiting the EU passed the ballot test. A proponent for this Brexit or Leave campaign, UK Independence Party Leader Nigel Farage, declared that the balloting day – June 23 – would be Britain’s Independence Day. The assumption here is that the UK had lost its autonomy for too many governing matters and has therefore become occupied by the EU.
The detailed results of the balloting is explained in this article here:
Quick facts about the Brexit
• On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom voted to exit the European Union by a 52 percent to 48 percent margin. There is no legal precedent for an EU member state to exit the Union, and a prolonged period of political and economic uncertainty is expected.
• Following the vote in the U.K., Prime Minister David Cameron announced he would resign, setting off a power struggle for his successor.
• Cameron said there would be no immediate change in the free movement of people, goods and services, both in and out of the U.K.
• The Bank of England stated it will enable British lenders to provide credit to businesses and households throughout the period of uncertainty. The BoE said it is also prepared to provide an additional £250 billion in liquidity to banks, in sterling and foreign currency, if required.
• Companies must continue to abide by regulations based on EU legislation until the exit is complete, which is expected to take up to two years.
What are some of the political implications? Bernie McKay, Chief Public Policy Officer of publically-traded Silicon Valley-based company Intuit, Inc. said: “There are uncertain downstream implications about Britain’s future political leadership, which will take months to settle. But the governmental implications extend much further, including uncertainty about the future unity of the United Kingdom itself – watch for the revival of calls for Scottish independence, and for a referendum about the future of Northern Ireland. There is also the risk of exit ‘contagion’ in the EU – watch for movements in other member countries for EU exits.”
“There will be lots of speculation and rumors about Brexit implications for businesses, but it is again premature to reliably predict the real world outcomes, which will emerge gradually over the next several years as the dust settles. We will continue to engage and closely follow developments and implications.”
There is a lot of uncertainty from this Brexit action – the subject of independence is turning out to be more hype than hope; see the VIDEO in the Appendix below.
This subject is presented in conjunction with the book Go Lean … Caribbean and its accompanying movement. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), a technocratic federal government – modeled after the EU – to administer and optimize the economic, security, and governing engines of the 30 member Caribbean states. The book and previous blogs are reflections of a regional interdependence movement. This is more hope, than hype!
A philosophical attack on the EU is therefore an attack on the Caribbean’s future. We must be aware … and on guard.
In truth, the EU has prospered; it has been a win-win for all of its members. It has endured hardships (consider for example, the sovereign debt crisis in Greece) that under previous European regime’s would have resulted in wars; on two occasions, World Wars. Now so much of the rest of the world – especially Africa and the MiddleEast – wants what the EU has. This is why one of the greatest challenges for the EU as a whole and for each individual member-state is immigration or refugee migration. A basic requirement of the economic integration of the EU is the free movement of labor. So anytime, a refugee finds his/her way inside EU borders, they can travel to any member-state. The only way to prevent this free movement is to exit the EU. This is the British decision!
The UK does not want economic stagnation; they way progress. But they have wrongly accepted the fallacy of economic independence.
Things in Britain will get worse before it gets worse.
True, the EU is not perfect. They have some defects to fix. But the winning formula for fixing the governance is not shouting instructions from outside the trading group, but rather reforming and transforming it from the inside. But with Britain’s exit, they will have not further influence on the group, or the EU’s policies and procedures.
Make no mistake, EU member-states are Britain’s largest trading partners. Like any kind of collaborative relationship, there must be some “give-and-take”. The masses who voted to “Leave“, seem to want to take and not contribute as freely to the giving part. See the related chart in the photo here.
Considering the EU as a model for the CU, a big lesson for us from this drama is that without a “give-and-take” ethos, no economic integration would succeed. This has always been a problem for the UK since the start of the European “Integration Project”. Time and again, they opted-out out of so many regional regulations/proceedings. For example, the EU needed a constitution, but some countries, the UK most prominently, balked at the idea, so the rest of the trading pact opted for modified treaties as opposed to an enforceable constitution. Britain wanted their “cake and to eat it too”. So hopefully now, with a true Brexit, the constitution effort can re-emerge.
Then there is the issue of unity; the Brexit vote shows that some elements in the United Kingdom are not so “united”. Just two years ago, a referendum in Scotland to secede from the United Kingdom – and join the EU as a full member including the Eurozone Monetary Union – was narrowly defeated. No doubt, this Brexit vote will renew the call for Scottish Independence, and maybe even spur a similar campaign for Northern Ireland.
But the complaints of the British masses who voted to “leave” must be acknowledged. They are angry, dissatisfied and protesting the status quo. The Go Lean roadmap posits that globalization is less than perfect; it creates a lot of winners, at the expense of a lot of losers. Those who cling to their nationalistic orthodoxy tend to be among the losing classes. Change is afoot; there is the need to move from the status quo and position a community at the corner of preparation and opportunity.
The recent 2008 global financial crisis taught the important lesson that without preparation and planning the people suffer. The events of that year proved to be a crisis, one that still lingers even to this day. But the Go Lean book trumpets that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”. In the Caribbean, we want our homeland to be a better place to live, work and play, so we must avail ourselves to the crisis in the UK, EU and the rest of the world and apply the lessons learned here at home.
For 16 of the 30 Caribbean member-states – see chart in the Appendix of 5 actual British Overseas Territories – the United Kingdom is their colonial legacy. The sins of the parents – much of the UK’s “Leave” supporters were motivated by hate – should not fall to the children. While ‘Mother England’ balks at the EU confederacy, we in the Caribbean should embrace the confederacy of the CU, even though it is a model of the EU. Only then can real solutions be forged for the Caribbean region, like creating 2.2 million jobs across the integrated market of 42 million people and growing the regional economy to $800 Billion of GDP.
There are a lot of lessons in this Brexit drama for the Caribbean. Many of these lessons were codified in the pages of the Go Lean book; though the book was written in 2013, it anticipated opposition to any confederation effort. The book presents “sharing” or give-and-take as a community ethos – the fundamental spirit of a culture that drives the practices of society – that needs to be adopted. The book also details other ethos to adopt, plus the executions of the following strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to forge collaborations in Caribbean communities:
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future
Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship
Page 28
Community Ethos – Promote Intellectual Property
Page 29
Community Ethos – Ways to Bridge the Digital Divide
Page 31
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing
Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good
Page 37
Strategy – Confederate 30 Caribbean Member-States into a Single Market
Page 45
Strategy – Customers – Member-state Governments
Page 47
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization
Page 57
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Member-state Governments -vs- CU Federal Agencies
Implementation – Ways to Impact Elections – For Federal Offices and a Constitution
Page 116
Implementation – Ways to Benefit from Globalization
Page 119
Implementation – Ways to Promote Independence
Page 120
Planning – Ways to Improve Trade
Page 128
Planning – Ways to Model the EU
Page 130
Planning – Lessons Learned from the West Indies Federation – Previous Integration Effort
Page 135
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy
Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs
Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance
Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract
Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security
Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Communications
Page 186
Advocacy – Ways to ImpactBritishTerritories
Page 245
The underlying spirit behind this Brexit protest is a quest to “appoint new guards” to make the homeland a better place to live, work and play. The Caribbean’s quest for societal elevation is similar; but instead of a call for independence, it is a quest for interdependence; so pronounced in this Declaration of Interdependence at the outset of the Go Lean book (Page 12):
xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.
The need for “new guards” have been frequently detailed in previous Go Lean blog-commentaries. Consider this sample:
The events in the UK and EU are important for us to consider … and learn. Truth be told, the Caribbean is in competition with this European world, and losing. We lose a lot of our citizens to these very same countries.
The quest to change the Caribbean will require convincing people to not act to their own detriment, as it appears the UK has done with this Brexit vote. Independence is not the answer; interdependence should be embraced more. This message must be trumpeted throughout Caribbean society – loud and clear. This is a mission of the Go Lean roadmap. This is a heavy-lifting task, but worth all the effort.
This is commentary 1 of 6 from the Go Lean movement on the subject of Economic Fallacies. This series presents the imagery of an animal – a dog perhaps – foraging for food, but then gets distracted and “chases a squirrel up a tree”. The squirrel in the tree will never be a meal; it is just a waste of time and energy for the animal. This analogy conveys the waste of time associated with frivolous and fallacious pursuits. The other commentaries are detailed as follows:
All of these commentaries are economic in nature. They refer to rules for managing the valuable resources of time, talents and treasuries. There are best-practices for winning and cautionary tales from losing. Normally these are discovered after the fact, not before hand. So examining the experiences of other communities, the winners and losers, can be extremely helpful to our Caribbean cause. This too, is a mission of the Go Lean roadmap.
Everyone in the Caribbean – citizens, institutions and member-state governments – are hereby urged to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap. The end-result, once successful, is a better homeland to live, work and play. 🙂
Published on Jun 27, 2016 –
The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, and it looks like it may not be an especially smooth transition. EXCUSE THE PROFANITY!
The book Go Lean … Caribbean is now available to download as an e-Book … for free.
These alarming abandonment rates have been communicated to the governments and leaders of the region and yet still, the problem persists. They have not taken action to curb the problem.
